Op/Ed

Elian Gonzalez, a Painful Chapter in
Cuban-American History

Posted May 7, 2017 07:15 pm | Op-Ed

By
Martin Dyckman

Some things in life ought to be above politics, none
more so than a parent’s relationship to a child. How
this truth was sorely tested in Florida not so long ago
is the subject of a new documentary that we should all
want to see [Elian]. CNN reportedly will air it sometime after
it begins to appear in theaters later this month.

As described in the Miami Herald, it relates the
“painful chapter in Cuban-American history” that began
early on Thanksgiving morning 1999 when two South
Florida fishermen found 5-year Elian Gonzalez tied to an
inner tube in the ocean.

His mother and 10 others who were trying to flee Cuba
had drowned two days before when their boat swamped. His
father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, was still in Cuba, where
Elian had frequently stayed with him after his parents’
divorce. He had not consented to his ex-wife removing
the boy from the island.

Relatives in Miami took custody of the child and
refused the demands of his father and the Cuban
government to send him home, turning a human saga of
death and survival into an international incident.

To the Miami relatives and much if not most of the
Cuban exile community there, it was a struggle between
the democracy where they thought he should live and the
dictatorship where his sole surviving parent lived. A
father’s rights to his son seemed no part of it. Little
thought was given, not in public anyhow, to how
Americans might feel if it were a case of an American
father trying to retrieve a child from Cuba.

The relatives filed asylum applications on Elian’s
behalf, but the Immigration and Naturalization Service
rejected them. After interviewing both the boy and his
father, the agency found that the father had not been
coerced by the Cuban government and that 6-year-olds
“lack the capacity to file personally for asylum against
the wishes of their parents.” The case went to court. A
district court sided with the government, and the
relatives appealed to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals, which upheld the INS June 1, 2000.

That court said that although it was “troubled” by
the fact that Cuba was a dictatorship, the INS was
“reasonable” in concluding that the father’s wishes
trumped political concerns.

By then, armed federal agents acting under Attorney
General Janet Reno‘s command had rescued Elian, or
kidnapped him, depending on one’s point of view, to
reunite him with his father in Washington. The April 21
raid was incendiary news, especially at Miami, where
Reno had been the state attorney before becoming Bill
Clinton‘s longest-serving Cabinet member.

Father and son remained in the United States while
the Miami relatives appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
On June 28, the high court refused to hear the case.
Elian and his father returned to Cuba a few hours later.
They live there still; Elian is now an industrial
engineering graduate, a member of the Young Communists
Union, and an admirer of the late dictator Fidel Castro.

I had known Reno for years, considered her a friend,
and wasn’t surprised by the courage she displayed in
doing what she knew would be greatly unpopular back
home.

It was the last of her significant controversial
decisions she made at the Justice Department, one of
which was to authorize the independent counsel’s
investigation that led to Clinton’s impeachment by the
House.

But there was the ex-president, speaking at her
memorial service December in Miami, praising her as the
person whom he knew would always do what she thought was
right, no matter the consequences.

The Gonzalez story was underplayed on that occasion.
The Cuban community was still celebrating Fidel Castro’s
recent death, and Reno’s family thought it best not to
reopen old wounds by revealing the telephone call they
had received after she had lost her long struggle with
Parkinson’s disease. I had been told, but in confidence.

This week, upon news of the documentary, they decided
the time had come.

The week after Reno died, her surviving sibling, Maggy
Hurchalla, answered the phone at the Reno homestead in
Kendall.

“This is the Cuban embassy in Washington, D.C.,” the
caller said. “We have a message for the family of Janet
Reno …

“The family of Elian Gonzalez would like to convey
their love and gratitude for sending their boy home.”

Yes, there are still some things that are more
important than politics.

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Martin Dyckman
is a retired associate editor of what is now the Tampa
Bay Times. He is author of Floridian of His Century: The Courage
of Governor LeRoy Collins. He lives in Asheville, North
Carolina. Column courtesy of Florida Politics.

This piece was reprinted by the Columbia County Observer
with permission or license.